Chapter Twenty-One
Okay. This is different now. You’re so close that I can almost touch you and I’m putting up all these walls to keep you away from me, but I’m still . . . God, I’m still writing these letters. So part of me wants you to know me and the other part . . . the other part is fucking terrified. But now it’s not just us that’s different, it’s my whole life. For the first time I’m making room in my heart for someone. Or, I’m trying to. ’Course, there’s part of me that’s saying this is stupid, I should keep her away — it’s all going to end the way it always has ended, tears, recriminations, me pouring all the pain into my job and my writing. Never standing still long enough to feel anything. But she . . .
The prospect of meeting you isn’t about you. It’s about me. I want to know you, or . . . I want to know who you are but really I want to know me. Where I came from, how I came to be. And I want it straight, no justifications, no excuses. No hiding. I just want to know. And then it’s over, this whole life I’ve built on sand, because I shall know. Whether I’m from doctor or digger stock. No more late-night fantasies. You’ll be tearing away the plaster that’s lain over an old, old wound, ripping it off and letting the air get to it, get to me, show me who I am. Then I can go on with life, I can start to settle.
And I want that. Holly is . . . for the first time, she’s the woman I want to be with. I don’t know how it happened, suddenly she was here, touching my heart. When she listened, just sat there and listened to me talk, about you, about the past . . . and she saw. She watched me open up for the first time in my life, talk about what all this meant to me — all the shit that I’ve kept hidden, kept away from the other women, the ones that just wanted the image . . . And it makes me cry, over and over again, the fact that I couldn’t live, couldn’t be who I was, because I had to protect myself from their pity. Had to be in control of it all. Never let anyone in, never let anyone see that at the heart of me was this big, empty nothingness, because how could I know what lay inside me, when I didn’t even know who I was?
Now I’m ready to share myself with someone else. But first I have to understand . . .